Octopus Salad

Ensalada de Pulpo

Preparation info
  • 4

    servings as an appetizer as a main-dish salad
    • Difficulty

      Easy

Appears in
Food from My Heart: Cuisines of Mexico Remembered and Reimagined

By Zarela Martínez

Published 1992

  • About

Most Mexican recipes for octopus require cooking times of about an hour. But the baby octopus can be cooked very quickly—3 to 5 minutes—with good results. My friend Giorgio Petracco showed me the trick of putting a cork in the cooking liquid to tenderize the octopus—a technique I’d heard of for tough cuts of meat but had never tried on seafood.

The baby octopus, not much bigger than a walnut, are often available in Chinese fish markets. If you have to clean them you